Uh, I raid lead my guild which would probably fall under your criteria of normal mode/slow heroic profession and I absolutely expect my raiders to perfect their professions. Whether it's a noticeable upgrade or not is immaterial, because the point is not really the actual dps upgrade, rather the commitment to excelling at their role.

And also sending a message that you only care that the character is only meant for raiding. And telling them if they might like to gather while doing dailies or fishing on their mains or achievements? Oh, sorry, not optimal. You'll have to go out of your way to do it on their alts. So long as they are maxed on the profession, so what? It's a maxed profession and provides a beneficial stat gain. So long as their gemming/enchanting is well done, the professions are only barely important to a theoretical maximum performance pretty much nobody but progression heroic raiders are really capable are pushing.

It just tends to lock in an odd mindset that the stats are more important than the practice and player skill, which is where the raid's fate is really going to lie.

And also sending a message that you only care that the character is only meant for raiding. And telling them if they might like to gather while doing dailies or fishing on their mains or achievements? Oh, sorry, not optimal. You'll have to go out of your way to do it on their alts. So long as they are maxed on the profession, so what? It's a maxed profession and provides a beneficial stat gain. So long as their gemming/enchanting is well done, the professions are only barely important to a theoretical maximum performance pretty much nobody but progression heroic raiders are really capable are pushing.

It just tends to lock in an odd mindset that the stats are more important than the practice and player skill, which is where the raid's fate is really going to lie.

Stats directly affect the performance of your character. What stats you have depend on your gear, enchants, gems, reforges, and yes... professions. And making sub-optimal choices for those will hinder your performance. And those small individual choices may not look like much by themselves, but numerous small optimizations combined can make a noticeable difference.

Originally Posted by HollerTH

I rarely see anyone at a skill level where min/maxing on professions is as important as all the other things they could be doing.

And who are you to judge their skill level, and how do you know if they are or are not doing other things to better their performance? I think that anyone willing to change professions to increase their dps is probably also looking into other ways to optimize their performance.

Uh, I raid lead my guild which would probably fall under your criteria of normal mode/slow heroic profession and I absolutely expect my raiders to perfect their professions. Whether it's a noticeable upgrade or not is immaterial, because the point is not really the actual dps upgrade, rather the commitment to excelling at their role.

Just because there are more important factors doesn't belittle this. It's very easy for someone to grasp all of these "important" factors and there's no legitimate reason for not doing it besides being lazy. Especially if it's a new recruit, it's the little things you need to look for and understand why they did that to help determine if they're a good candidate. With that being said, I'm not about to remove someone from a raid just they may have skinning instead of BS or JC, but it's my job as raid leader to try to make the raid as good as possible. I try to strongly advise my raiders to better their characters in any way possible, but I'm not forcing it down their throats because we're not a world first guild.

It also opens a slippery slope though. Why get professions, it's only like 300 stat. Why bother enchanting my gloves, it's a useless enchant anyway. By themselves none of them amount to any significant change, however when combined it's a noticeable difference.

If a person was slacking all over with lacking gems, enchants, not leveling professions and so on, yes your point is perfectly valid. However a normal mode/a few heroic modes down guild can't possibly demand that a person who is otherwise doing what he can to carry her/his own weight change a fully leveled profession just to gain a miniscule amount and make that demand with a straight face. Just by your progression alone it's clear that you don't take the game that seriously and expecting nothing short of perfection from your raiders at that point is simply silly.

I'm in a 12/13 heroic guild that raids 8 hours per week, and I really don't see the problem with someone having a gathering profession. Sure it may not be optimal, but professions aren't JUST about the stat bonuses. I may put more emphasis on the RPG part of this game than others, but my main in a blacksmith because I like hunting down patterns and it feels like a DK should be a blacksmith. The character power bonus associated with BS is just a bonus to me. If someone in my raid team just likes gathering I am not going to hold a grudge on him just because he isn't willing to dump a profession he finds enjoyable in favor of something that gives a better power bonus. And profession swapping cannot be equated to gemming or enchanting an item, as that takes 10 seconds and if your gbank is well managed should be covered by the guild anyway.

Also, if you are talking about min/maxing to that degree, why stop at professions? Why not require ALL warriors to race change to worgen? Why not require all DKs to change to troll, hunters to orcs, etc, ? Are people not "hardcore" enough if they want to stay with whatever race appeals to them most? To me the $25 for a race change is nothing, and is less valueable to me in RL than the however many hours it would take to level a new profession. Some people value time more than RL money, so expecting someone to swap professions that they may enjoy for a power increase is no more reasonable than expecting them to race swap for a power bonus.

Unless you are in a world first or server first pushing guild, the DPS difference between 480 crit and 320 agility means next to nothing. I go with Blacksmithing/Jewelcrafting because I want to optimize, but I wouldn't expect anyone in a normal mode raiding guild or a slow progressing heroic guild to bother with perfecting professions. There are so many much more important factors to consider. If you are at the point where the only thing you can do to improve yourself is changing to a different profession, you are pushing the limits of what is possible which is only neccesary in world first/server first races.

Guys, Noorri is complete right about this. It's such a tiny upgrade it's not worth it unless you're doing it for cash as well.

If you don't believe him try changing a 160 agility gem for a 320 crit gem and see how much your DPS drops. "But I've not noticed it drop at all" is what you'll likely say after this little experiment.

edit: yes i understand he's wanting to change the other way round but I'm guessing he has no 320 crit gems he can change for a 160 agility gem. But I'm guessing he does have some 160 agility gems he can change for crit. Just reverse your results and you'll get your 'increase'.

Guys, Noorri is complete right about this. It's such a tiny upgrade it's not worth it unless you're doing it for cash as well.

If you don't believe him try changing a 160 agility gem for a 320 crit gem and see how much your DPS drops. "But I've not noticed it drop at all" is what you'll likely say after this little experiment.

edit: yes i understand he's wanting to change the other way round but I'm guessing he has no 320 crit gems he can change for a 160 agility gem. But I'm guessing he does have some 160 agility gems he can change for crit. Just reverse your results and you'll get your 'increase'.

Depends on the player I guess. The way I do it, I'll regem/reforge/roll another prof if I gain 100 or more theoretical DPS for each 1k gold spent.
I was a Herbalist on my Warlock but I changed my spec to Demonology/Destruction (from affliction) and I also got Engineering (I also like engi :P have it on 5 chars and counting). I wanted to get 600 engineering before the raid, in around 4 hours so I payed ~25k for engi + 5k for Jeeves. It was worth every copper for me.

Uh, I raid lead my guild which would probably fall under your criteria of normal mode/slow heroic profession and I absolutely expect my raiders to perfect their professions. Whether it's a noticeable upgrade or not is immaterial, because the point is not really the actual dps upgrade, rather the commitment to excelling at their role.

Then you're being unreasonable. Note that Noori isn't talking about whether to max two credible professions but the difference between one maxed profession and another which is TINY and simply won't matter outside of world 10 guilds. Insisting on people spending hours and hours redoing their professions for a difference that won't be noticed isn't doing anything more than throwing your weight around.

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Originally Posted by Ichifails

Depends on the player I guess. The way I do it, I'll regem/reforge/roll another prof if I gain 100 or more theoretical DPS for each 1k gold spent.

Which is fine, being your choice on how to play, but you have to realize that the 100 dps you might see on a sim will be completely and utterly overwhelmed by the tiniest of things... a small lag spike, one mistake on your part, a signature ability delayed for a few seconds, etc. 100 dps wehen you're talking about 100k DPS is 0.1%. It's meaningless to progress or any real world performance.

You'd be FAR better off spending time on the dummies and making sure you are nailing your rotation *perfectly*.

EDIT: Oh, you're talking about 100dps/1kgold. I'm still kind of 'eh' on that since I don't know that spending 25k gold to get 2.5k more dps is really worth it to me, but that's again a personal choice. Tuning gems and reforges is so cheap that it's an easy 'do this' but asking people to spend thousands of gold and/or lots of hours for a very tiny benefit like the difference between profs is, to me, mostly rooted in dick swinging vs real, demonstrable benefits.

@OP: If you're comfy with having skinning/herbing on an alt to support your rogue, then go nuts. All my alts have gathering professions with their respective "real" professions. Only my main runs without a gathering prof (but between my alts, he is covered).

I only have one question, aren't they increasing the bonuses from secondary stats? As in from Mining, Herbalism and Skinning. I thought I saw that in some patch note, though might have been from 5.3 or it is coming in 5.4.

Well as a dps you should have planed it out. I think its been pretty rare that a rogue ever "stacked" crit rating.... Having said that What does agility give you? AtkPwr and...........? lol If you loose agility for crit you have lost attack power. I dont know the current math on what 1point of agility gives you crit wise but unless you are a fury warr debating skinning/chant then i would say keep skinnig cause crit for them is awesome. You are a rogue... just like a hunter and enhance sham you are going to have a LOT of crit just from your main stat which is AGI. In my mindset ( fury dps aside and myself being a dps since the start of BC ) I never sacrifice my main stat over a secondary stat. If i have a blue gem slot that gives say 100 haste im not going to gem 50str 50hit(or w/e) to get my bonus. I am going to stack as much of my main stat as I can and since meta gems no longer have color requirements then its going to be all red gems unless my socket bonus(str) will net a higher str value for meeting the color required(and as long as im not behind in a tier and playing catch up i have always toped dps meters unless my class gets nerfd to the ground).

Also unless youve leveled a few toons saved your boe stuff an banked everything you could have its gona be id say the most expensive proff to power level from the AH. Dropping a gathering proff for another crafting proff is only going to be a net gain. Stam/haste/crit is what you get from mining/herb/skinning
All of the crafting professions will give you some form of a main stat increase and they are all fairly balanced ( i know strange right! lol )

I find it amusing how much time raiders will spend minmaxing on professions, compared to the time they spend on understanding the boss abilities, timing their defensive cooldowns and utilities.

During my time raiding HC modes (started at rank in the 500s, and got down to around 20s) i think i must have done thousands of pulls on bosses, and i can only think of dying to enrage once, whereas most wipes were due to people forgetting a mechanic, "finishing a cast" in order to do the "perfect rotation", the raid taking too much damage (lack of cooldowns/awareness).

Given raiders a) and b)
a) a raider who can perform at 90% dps all the time, while reacting to every boss ability, using all their utility and using their defensive cooldowns for the biggest damage spikes.
b) a raider who executes his dummy rotation pefectly in his optimized professions, but dies to shit, does not utilize everything in his spellbook/talents/glyphs and does not use his def CD:s

I would take a) any time.

More on topic though, I like to max my professions as well, while understanding it is definitely not my #1 priority as a dps.